What Hillary Clinton Taught Lauren Duca About Feminism

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the guest-editor of our Volume IV issue, on newsstands nationally December 5. She will keynote at the first-ever Teen Vogue Summit in conversation with actress, scholar, and activist Yara Shahidi. The Teen Vogue Summit will take place on December 1 & 2 in Los Angeles. Tickets and information are available here. Here, Lauren Duca reflects on what Hillary's political career has taught her.

I remember growing up hearing horrible stories about Hillary Clinton, and I see now how they were similar to the horrible stories I was told about feminism. The movement has been warped by an ugly stigma that leads too many women to irrationally deny a movement that exists for their benefit. It worked on me at first. I told cute guys in college that I wasn’t a feminist. Thankfully, by my junior year, the book Full Frontal Feminism had saved my life. I think a lot of young women experienced a similar awakening when Beyoncé made Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s definition of the word go viral back in 2014.

In high school, four years before I discovered feminism I was excited about Hillary’s 2008 run. My Fox News–watching parents informed me that she was corrupt and mumbled some conspiracy theory about a dead guy in the woods. A teacher told me I liked her only because she was a woman. I was told these things were true.

In her 2014 book Hard Choices, Hillary writes about the ways her public narrative has been distorted by sexism. It’s striking to confront the burden that she has had to bear under the weight of these falsified personae for three decades. It’s striking to hear firsthand her most egregious experiences of misogyny as we are told ad nauseam to stop playing “the woman card” in her defense.

Zooming out on Hillary’s 2016 loss reveals the broader contours of women’s oppression. We’re told that sexism is something we are dreaming up, that the women’s movement is unnecessary, or unsavory, or both. Even faced with the mind-numbingly obvious role that sexism played in the 2016 election, we are still parsing the extent to which Hillary’s every flaw must be cataloged and examined. This bullsh*t buffet truly never ends.

IT TOOK ME YEARS TO UNPACK THE LIES I’D BEEN TOLD ABOUT FEMINISM AND ABOUT HILLARY.

It took me years to unpack the lies I’d been told about feminism and about Hillary. Gender inequality was so aggressively denied in the 2016 campaign, it was easy to lose sight of the most concrete examples. For me, the most grounding and concise description came from Rebecca Traister, who asked, during a panel at Rutgers University in spring 2017, “If we only have a problem with Hillary Clinton, not with women, why is she the only woman who has ever gotten this far?”

Hard Choices is a chance to listen to Hillary’s answer as to why she’s gotten as far as she has. She has fallen, but not in vain, for her story is an undeniable reminder that the battle for women’s equality is far from over. Sexism necessarily infects every aspect of a woman’s life, but our lived experiences are so routinely silenced that its all encompassing presence is called into question. Hillary’s loss was a blow to the women’s movement, but it can also be a turning point. In this next wave of the feminist fight, we must honor her story, and keep telling ours.